[throwaway81523]

Twitter baffles me. I don't understand why anyone uses it since its UI (at least for readers) is so terrible. People split long posts into dozens of tweets because of the 288 char limit, or else post images of printed pages, instead of using a blogging platform. You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet. I joke that the main purpose of 5G mobile is so they can increase the bloat to 10MB instead of 1MB to read a tweet. Finally, it is stupendously influential in the real world, yet Musk was able to buy 10% of it for around $3B, so it has a fraction of a percent of Facebook's market cap. I don't know anyone who uses Facebook any more or cares what happens on it, but Twitter steers everything. It's weird.

[jrockway]

You go where the readers are, not where the best author UX is. The draw of Twitter is that your random thought can be forced upon millions of people ("the algorithm"), and you get feedback like "31,000 people gave you a <3". You aren't going to get that anywhere else.

[hackernewds]

Disagree with that assessment. The readers go where the good authors are as well - and so it is with Groupon, Doordash, Etsy, etc

[userbinator]

You get a megabyte of JS bloat along with your 288 character tweet.

For a very long time, if you went to mobile.twitter.com and set your User-Agent to that of some old browser, you'd get a sane plain-HTML version. Apparently you can still get plain HTML if you use Googlebot instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464280

[_moof]

> People split long posts into dozens of tweets

I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape about this. Ok, there's more than one tweet, but they're all on one page, in order, so you've got all the text right there. It's not like you have to do anything special to read it. You just read it and scroll, like you would any other medium. What's the problem?

[svnpenn]

People are deliberately misusing the site. The whole point of the character limit, is to force you to make a concise thought.

Some people ignore that, and just ramble over a dozen tweets, like a monkey with a typewriter. The anarchist in me says fine, but objectively it's just a dumb way to use the site. Just make a blog post and link to it.

[_moof]

Twitter very intentionally added support for this use case. There's literally a button just for it. There's even a help page about how to do it: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-a-thread

So maybe this would've been a misuse in 2007, but nowadays it isn't. An objection based on rules just doesn't hold water.

[svnpenn]

Even if CEO says, "yes do this", it's still an idiotic way to use the site. If you trying to kill a bear, you don't shoot it 18 times with a BB gun. You shoot it once with a shotgun.

[MisterBastahrd]

Many people are not using twitter directly. They're using hootsuite or one of the other marketing products that make twitter usable.

[manmal]

It simply is the place where people post relevant, up-to-date stuff. People put up with bad UX all the time to get what they want.

[NaturalPhallacy]

It's a mouthpiece of the establishment. The ideologically agree, so they get space on legacy media, just like facebook.

Notice how you don't see any discussions, or news stories related to 4chan unless it's bad? But there've been really wholesome things there, and really interesting benign things too.

But they treat twitter/fb/reddit, like pals, because they all stamp out wrongthink.

[saagarjha]

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